At Mirasol Therapeutics in Pueblo West, one big secret is how to make the marijuana edibles taste good. Not bitter, not like dirt, not full of undesirable fiber.

Kitchen manager Michael Tapia smiles as he politely invokes the “that’s proprietary” response to a reporter’s question about taste, but the kitchen’s metal shelves offer an answer: bottles of corn syrup, a package of chocolate chips and a can of cocoa, jars of peanut butter, a can of cashews, pre-sweetened dry cereal, plus staples like flour and sugar.

These ingredients are bound to make anything more palatable.

Mirasol is one of a handful of Pueblo County dispensaries licensed to sell marijuana and marijuana products for recreational and medicinal use; its kitchen also is licensed by the state to make edible pot products.

“We make candy bars, suckers, medicated pretzels — they’re dipped in medicinal chocolate — hard candy, brownies and cereal bars,” Tapia says. “We also do hashes (hashish), like bubble hash. You can eat it, can smoke it, can use it in edibles.”

Tapia says Mirasol uses bubble hash and hash oil as well as marijuana butter in making its edible products.

Butter and oil are preferred carriers for THC — the most active ingredient in marijuana — because THC is fat-soluble.

Recipes abound

Marijuana butter — or cannabutter as it’s sometimes called — is popular with pot bakers on the Internet, who say it’s easy to make. Simmer finely ground weed in regular dairy butter until the butter turns green; strain the butter to catch any errant plant material; refrigerate and use the resulting THC-containing solid as a replacement for regular butter in recipes.

One Internet recipe for marijuana butter calls for using 1 pound of dairy butter (not margarine) and 1/2 ounce of finely ground marijuana.

Mirasol is more exacting, according to Tapia. Put the butter and the marijuana in a slow cooker; cook it for 12 hours; refrigerate it so that it separates. This leaves a solid chunk of butter on top, which Mirasol sends to a Denver lab for testing. Every batch is tested for mold, mildew, fungus, “filth” and cannabinoids such as THC.

Tapia declines to answer more questions about how the store makes its marijuana butter.

Mirasol also sells another company’s cannabutter, which contains 1,000mg of THC per 4-ounce tub, according to Tapia.

By law, recreational edibles can’t contain more than 100mg of THC, while there’s no upper legal limit for edible medicinal products; some medicinal candy bars have 300mg.

Tapia says Mirasol suggests a single 10- to 15-mg dose of an edible marijuana product for someone who’s trying it for the first time. What that dose represents — a portion of a brownie or cookie, one or more candies from a package — depends on the individual product. Wait at least an hour before eating any more because it takes quite a while to feel the effects of the THC in an edible — longer than when smoking marijuana.

Mirasol’s cook, Kyle Jones, says he developed the recipes he uses through trial and error, and currently spends about 60 hours a week making edible pot products. His favorite is the cereal bar. Tapia likes the brownies best.

“The industry has just exploded,” Tapia says. “The edibles are getting better and better, the hash oils are starting to get a lot more refined.

Precautions taken

Marijuana edibles are all zipped up when they leave Mirasol Therapeutics.

Both recreational and medicinal edibles are in opaque packaging. Each product has a warning on it that says it’s not for consumption by children. Each has an ingredient listing that includes substances used to produce the marijuana plants and ingredients used in making the food product; a batch number, an expiration date and a seal that verifies the product is for retail sale.

All edibles are sealed in childproof, odor-proof plastic zip-lock bags after they’re purchased.